Mountain Madness by Daniel Pyle Page B

she ran over the stranger and bounced back with a grunt.
    “Hey,” the guy said, moving toward her. For a second, she thought about ignoring him, pushing past without saying a word and continuing her search, but then she got a look at his face and stopped. The man was no stranger, and she didn’t think she’d ever been so glad to see him.
    “What’s going on?” Mike asked her, frowning. “Where’s Trevor?”

SEVEN
    MIKE PARKED THE truck at the far end of the lot not because he couldn’t find a space closer to the food court entrance, but simply because he always parked at the far ends of lots. He wasn’t afraid the pickup might get dinged by a careless door opener or a runaway shopping cart—at this point, the truck couldn’t have looked much more battered if you’d taken a grenade to it—he liked the outskirts. That was all. After being folded into the cab of his truck for any uncomfortable length of time, he was usually ready to stretch his legs and get his blood pumping. It was one of the things Libby had loved to tease him about and one of the eccentricities he no longer had to try to defend.
    He left the windows down, as was also his policy, so that the cab might be reasonably cool when he and Trevor returned. He had half a dozen ancient cassette tapes in the truck’s glove box, each worth nothing and thus more valuable than the vehicle itself. Even with the engine running and the doors unlocked, he figured the thing most likely to get nabbed would be his copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band .
    He passed through the farthest section of the lot, stepping over a curbed area of grass that acted as a traffic regulator in a way painted yellow lines never seemed to manage in the parking lots of the world. Pasted against the far side of the small island was a pile of windblown refuse comprised mostly of damp newspaper and flyers, an abstract mess of dirty papier-mâché.
    Litterbugs. The mountains had their share too, of course, but somehow the grime always seemed thicker down here, less manageable. You got the impression that with a lot of dedicated clean-up you could eventually scrub those mountain roads clean but that the stains here in the lowlands were permanent.
    Mike imagined a team of boy scouts with buckets and sponges going to work on the access road to his property and grinned sardonically as he stepped through the doors of the Mountain View. Upon seeing the grand carousel and the converging throng around it, however, his mind quieted, and his eyes bulged.
    Jesus . A fake Santa Claus at Christmas was one thing, but the shopping mall had really gone all out with this one. Except for the music, which seemed to come from aftermarket loudspeakers inconsistent with the rest of the ornamentation, this thing was the real deal. A craftsman himself, he could appreciate the time and manual labor that had gone into the creation of such a masterpiece. In today’s pre-fabricated, cookie-cutter world, things like this carousel were remnants of an era gone forever by the wayside. 
    A trio of teenage girls in ripped jeans and too-tight t-shirts bumped him from behind, striding in through the doors with their heads held high and their shoulders pulled back, a royal entourage from some universe gone terribly wrong. Mike tried hard not to stare at the exposed slices of flesh through the tears in the seats of their pants. 
    He stepped deeper into the mall and out of the path of any future entrants. Libby had said she’d meet him in the food court, but she hadn’t specified where; Mike had counted on her finding him , maybe flagging him down or shouting his name from wherever she and Trevor might be. But he guessed she probably hadn’t known about the carousel when she’d suggested the meeting place. Keeping Trevor away from that ride would undoubtedly have been harder than keeping a hungry dog from a steaming t-bone. If Mike knew his son, there was only one place the two of them could be.
    Mike walked